Ali Gass On ICA San Francisco’s Shift to a Nomadic Model

At a time when institutions, particularly in the U.S., are being forced to reassess their roles and operating models, ICA SF is in its element. Since its opening in 2020, it has explored what it means to be an independent yet public-facing institution rooted in its local community and the city it serves, shifting its focus from traditional exhibitions to context-specific artistic production. Under the leadership of it’s founding director and chief curator Ali Gass, ICA SF is guided by a clear ambition: to rethink what a museum can be by prioritizing experimental contemporary art, boundary-pushing exhibitions and deep public engagement rather than building a permanent collection.

“Early on, we understood that what we were offering artists was a space to try new things, to push their practice, often in response to specific space and context,” Gass tells Observer. Notably, ICA SF launched in the middle of the pandemic, at a moment when the need for institutions to respond quickly to urgent global issues felt unmistakable. “There was a real necessity to pull in artistic voices fast and give them the space to realize projects that could speak directly to the moment, but also for institutions to be able to take a left turn quickly when needed.”

Gass comes from a traditional institutional background, having previously worked as a curator at collecting museums such as The Jewish Museum, SFMOMA in San Francisco, the Broad Art Museum and the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, before serving as director of the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago and the Institute of Contemporary Art San José ICA SJ.

From the outset, Gass understood that the original venue in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood could not function as a permanent home. “The rent was incredibly expensive—about a quarter of our operating budget at the time, which simply didn’t make sense,” she says. Yet that early realization created an opportunity to pursue two priorities that felt essential to both ICA SF’s evolution and its mission to respond to the city’s shifting realities. One was to rethink how resources were allocated, not toward rent or building maintenance, but toward projects, people and programs. The other was to relocate to parts of the city where ICA SF could actively contribute to cultural revitalization, a priority that has become increasingly urgent.

While San Francisco already had strong collecting institutions, as well as a growing gallery scene and nonprofit landscape, ICA SF wanted to address a specific gap: the absence of a truly ambitious, non-collecting contemporary art museum. “The idea was to build that in a very Bay Area way—startup-like, experimental, moving quickly—and to launch with that ethos,” Gass explains, noting how non-collecting status allows for greater flexibility in allocating resources. “As a non-collecting institution, nimbleness is really built into our DNA, as is the ability to constantly rethink how exhibitions are made and to partner deeply with artists in realizing ambitious visions. That’s always been at the core of what we do.”

In 2024, the museum moved into a much larger space, The Cube, at 345 Montgomery Street in San Francisco’s Financial District, expanding its exhibition and public program capacity through a rent-free agreement with the building’s owner. The relocation grew out of a partnership with Vornado Realty Trust to reactivate a space that had sat vacant for nearly a decade. “We knew from the start that it wouldn’t be a permanent home, but it was incredibly exciting,” Gass recalls, noting that although the building had been partially renovated and appeared complete, it lacked essential infrastructure, such as electrical systems and HVAC, making it costly to operate and difficult to accommodate large-scale exhibitions. Still, during its time at The Cube, ICA SF staged several site-responsive projects. “Those were projects that couldn’t have been done anywhere else. But as we looked ahead, it became clear that certain kinds of shows would remain difficult in that space. That pushed us to keep evolving and to think more critically about what role we could play in a city that already has strong collecting institutions with permanent homes, but far fewer platforms dedicated to commissioning and production.”

That process ultimately led ICA SF, from late 2025 into 2026, to fully transition away from a fixed location toward a deliberate citywide nomadic model, activating exhibitions in architecturally and historically significant sites across San Francisco.

“There is so much potential here, especially when it comes to public-facing work,” Gass asserts, pointing out that San Francisco lacks the kind of public art infrastructure found in cities like New York, where organizations such as Creative Time, the Public Art Fund or Art Production Fund play a major role. “There are incredible architectural sites and public spaces that are open to new partnership models, and that feels like a meaningful direction for us.”

One of the first outcomes of this shift is ICA SF’s current activation of the iconic Transamerica Pyramid, featuring an exhibition of Tara Donovan’s reflective architectural sculptures on the ground floor alongside a new participatory 3D-printed living sculpture by Lily Kwong, currently taking shape in Redwood Park. When the institution was invited to collaborate, Gass immediately recognized that the gallery space presented highly specific conditions that demanded a precise artistic response: “It doesn’t have walls, it’s filled with light, and that light shifts constantly over the course of the day. It clearly called for sculpture, and for an artist whose work is deeply responsive to light and to architectural context.”

Her immediate, no-brainer choice was Donovan, an artist she had previously worked with and deeply admires. “When we brought her here, she immediately fell in love with the iconic modernist architecture of the Transamerica Pyramid,” Gass notes, adding that although not all the works were produced specifically for this presentation, they feel profoundly site-responsive. “It became an immediate and deeply symbiotic partnership.”

Set in dialogue with the building’s architecture, Donovan’s large-scale sculptures from her Stratagems series include five works never previously shown publicly, alongside others first presented at Pace New York, where they were originally conceived in dialogue with the skyscrapers of Hudson Yards. Composed of thousands of recycled CDs, these twisting columns crystallize Donovan’s long-standing investigation into how simple, mass-produced materials can be transformed through accumulation, repetition and process, while exploring how sculpture can reshape space and perception. The resulting forms remain in constant flux, responding to shifts in light and weather beyond the gallery walls, engaging architectural contexts and revealing moments of beauty within apparent chaos.

As ICA SF enters this new chapter, partnerships such as the one with Transamerica have become increasingly important, particularly for long-term sustainability. “Everyone is searching for new models. While we continue to rely on our board and individual supporters, many of the projects we’re launching this year are deeply funded through partner-driven models as well,” Gass says.

One of the most significant opportunities ahead lies in engaging the tech community that increasingly defines San Francisco’s economic landscape and concentrates much of its wealth. ICA SF already counts donors, supporters, and board members from major tech companies and has begun developing projects that directly intersect with technology to encourage meaningful engagement.

Lily Kwong’s project, for instance, involves pioneering work in 3D printing with soil- and seed-impregnated materials. Her site-specific living installation reimagines public space as a blooming ecosystem, inviting the local community to participate as pollinators in the work’s organic growth over time. The project is deeply participatory: visitors can watch the bricks being printed live, see the dome take shape and eventually witness it bloom into a seed-dispersal hub. Through a partnership with the Altadena Seed Library in Los Angeles, visitors will also be invited to take seed packets home. The result is a project that brings together art, science, ecology and public awareness, fostering a sense of care and responsibility toward the environment and the city itself.

Another project Gass is particularly excited about is an upcoming two-person exhibition with Dominique Fung and Heidi Lau. “Heidi Lau is a ceramicist who has begun experimenting with robotics in a very thoughtful way, as a collaboration between humanism and technology,” she notes. Lau has conceived a large-scale ceramic installation spanning approximately one thousand square feet that will hang like an oyster bed, with ceramic forms subtly opening and closing in response to a tide clock synced to San Francisco’s actual tides. “It’s a beautiful, poetic project. At first, neither of us quite knew how to make it happen, but that’s exactly the kind of challenge we want to take on,” Gass shares. Ultimately, a board member with expertise in technology and robotics connected Lau with a colleague from the Stanford robotics lab. “She was just genuinely curious about an artist’s process, and was able to sketch out a robotics infrastructure that Heidi would never have been able to imagine on her own. That’s the connector role we can play: creating moments where different forms of expertise push each other forward.” She adds that many individuals working in big tech are also committed collectors and supporters of the arts, able to offer artists access to resources that would otherwise be out of reach. Drawing on her experience at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford, where interdisciplinary collaboration between artists and academics was central, Gass says, “More and more artists are deeply interested in working with technology to achieve things they’re envisioning but don’t yet have the technical skills to realize. That kind of exchange allows both sides to learn from each other, and ideally, that’s where innovation really happens.”

Today, ICA SF raises funds on a project-by-project basis, but the new model has significantly reduced institutional overhead, now largely limited to compensation and payroll rather than the costs associated with maintaining a permanent building. “There is so much potential for meaningful public art in this city, and that’s where we see a real opportunity to contribute. There’s a lot of enthusiasm and support for this approach, and I think that’s rooted in San Francisco’s long history of risk-taking and innovation. But the responsibility then falls on us to make it financially viable.” Under its new nomadic model, ICA SF is increasingly able to function as a vital, fluid connector between the artistic community and the broader forces shaping the city’s present and future.

Asked how she would describe ICA SF today, Gass responds that she sees it as a contemporary art laboratory—a space for testing new models of production. “That was the founding ethos: always under construction, nimble, experimental. While many institutions use that language, what we’ve come to understand is that our experimentation is as much about institutional infrastructure as it is about artistic practice.”

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